Software development

Software development

Netflix has completed a major consolidation of its relational database infrastructure onto Amazon Aurora, reporting performance improvements of up to 75% and a 28% reduction in costs. The streaming giant's move from self-managed PostgreSQL on EC2 to the managed Aurora service highlights a broader industry trend toward offloading operational overhead to cloud-native database platforms. Facing challenges with a fragmented database landscape, Netflix's Online Data Stores (ODS) team struggled with the operational toil of managing deployed custom binaries, patching, and manual scaling.

The new program - which forms part of the company's Destination AI enablement framework - offers a three-phase pathway oriented around discovery, scoring, and activation. Partners work with customers to identify pain points across their organizations, with use cases then scored and prioritized based on factors such as feasibility, impact, and strategic alignment. The workshop then concludes with a shortlist of two to three high-value AI initiatives and a tailored 90-day roadmap for implementation.

Nowadays, everyone uses cross-platform hybrid desktop apps written in JavaScript, ignoring excessive CPU and RAM usage. You most likely use a hybrid, native-like, cross-platform code editor for day-to-day programming activities. It may work fine on your computer because you've upgraded your hardware, since it may have worked slowly before. If you check the resource usage of your favorite code editor, you'll see not megabytes of RAM, but gigabytes of RAM;

Adobe is updating its AI video-generation app, Firefly, with a new video editor that supports precise prompt-based edits, as well as adding new third-party models for image and video generation, including Black Forest Labs' FLUX.2 and Topaz Astra. Until now, Firefly only supported prompt-based generation, so you would have to recreate the entire clip if any part of the video was not to your liking. With the new editor, you can use text prompts to edit video elements, colors, and camera angles, and we also get a new timeline view that lets you adjust frames, sounds and other characteristics easily.

One of the many things I love about the Linux operating system is the vast array of choices available. If you don't like a distribution, find another one. If the desktop environment you're using doesn't suit your style or needs, consider installing a different one. If you need something faster, try a lightweight distribution. Given the vast number of distros available, there's almost no end to the combinations you can find.

However, the job of a software developer today is about more than just writing code. Thanks to the prevalence of DevOps, software developers tend to have a huge responsibility: they own the feature development, bug fixes, deployment pipeline, performance monitoring, cloud infrastructure and security of their code. Software development trends are constantly adapting to help software teams keep pace with the growing requirements of an increasingly digital society, and business leaders are recognising the value of software-powered business initiatives.

In essence, Yelp now writes terabytes of daily access logs but converts them into compact, parquet-formatted archives that are easy to query with tools like Amazon Athena. Through a process of periodic "compaction," raw plaintext log objects are merged into fewer, larger Parquet files, reducing storage usage by about 85% and cutting the number of objects by more than 99.99%. This transformation makes analytics efficient and cost-effective, enabling quick lookups for permission debugging, cost attribution, incident investigation, and data retention analysis.

VS Code 1.107 also adds support for the latest specification of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), 2025-11-25, which includes URL mode elicitation, tasks for long-running tool calls and client work, and enhancements to enum choices in elicitation. And the GitHub remote MCP Server now is provided as a built-in MCP server in the GitHub Copilot Chat extension, providing seamless integration with GitHub repositories and services, according to Microsoft. Other improvements emphasized in VS Code 1.107 include the following:

This National App Day, I would be remiss not to recognize how profoundly the application development landscape has changed over the last year with the rise of autonomous agents - signaling a pivotal change in how we build. As organizations integrate AI into every workflow, developers are transitioning from routine coding to designing and orchestrating systems that support agentic capabilities at far greater scale and speed.

"My job was architecting and writing programs that automated the network, connecting the bank's mainframe to terminals," Charles told On Call. He was very good at that job and built a reputation as a go-to resource for anything to do with the bank's networks. Which is why one day the bank's help desk called and asked for Charles because a user claimed to have a problem that had utterly confounded both first and second level support.

In 2026, generative AI stops being an experiment for software development and starts being an architectural liability. The initial rush to apply AI everywhere is hardening into a struggle with execution, where the primary hurdles are no longer capability, but control, cost, and security. We are already seeing the cracks in code integrity. As AI-assisted development becomes standard, the volume of code produced is outpacing human capacity to audit it. This "vibe coding" prioritises speed over structural soundness, creating a new category of technical debt.

We have mentioned Legacy Update a few times, such as when we wrote about running Windows XP in 2023 and how to keep Windows 7 running. It's essentially an independent third-party recreation of Microsoft's old Windows Update website, which just like the original analyzes your copy of Windows, finds what available updates (and Microsoft-supported device drivers) are applicable, downloads them, and installs them for you.

Google changes the AI coding landscape again. On November 18, 2025, Google introduced Antigravity - an AI-first development platform built for the agentic era. While tools like Cursor helped bring AI into the editor, Antigravity rethinks what the IDE itself should be in a world where agents don't just assist, but act. What exactly is Google Antigravity? Built around Gemini 3, Antigravity isn't just a smarter code editor.

Much of modern application development depends on APIs. In the past we may have built massive monolithic applications, but modern cloud-native development depends on collections of microservices, linked by APIs that offer everything from remote procedure calls to database operations. This approach makes applications easier to run, allowing them to scale with user demand. It also makes them more reliable, handling failover in the event of data center outages.

"If you talk to some of the CIOs in Europe who implemented ECC6, most of us will not be finished with the migration by 2030," Jestin told The Register. "SAP has agreed to extend support until 2032 if you have a joint roadmap and commitment. But if you don't have a roadmap by 2030, they'll stop support."

VIDEO An Australian parachuting club has been told to improve the software it uses to manage jumps, after an accident in which a jumper's 'chute hooked on an aircraft's tailplane. The incident occurred on September 20th when 16 parachutists attempted a formation jump from a Cessna 208. According to an Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) report on the incident, "As the first parachutist stepped out the door to assume the most forward (front float) position, their reserve parachute inadvertently deployed."

AI tools often produce code that compiles and runs, but contains subtle bugs, security vulnerabilities, or inefficient implementations that may not surface until production. AI systems also lack a true understanding of business logic. They often create solutions that seem to work - but hide issues that aren't found until later. As developers are building solutions, the AI will most frequently cover common solutions but fail on edge cases.

tons of tools for checking code,

Window Maker Live is a Debian-based desktop distro built around the classic Window Maker X11 window manager. As the "Live" in its name suggests, it's designed as a live-bootable image that's ready to use, with a rich variety of pre-installed software, carefully chosen and themed to fit in with Window Maker's NeXTstep-style look. Like many other Debian-based distros, this new version is based on this year's Debian 13 release, but with a difference:

Carnegie Mellon University has introduced Fray, a concurrency testing tool for JVM programs to catch bugs and replay them. Written in Kotlin and based on this research paper, Fray can't find all concurrency issues, but uses recent research to maximize the chances of detecting them. Fray uses shadow locking, a technique that incorporates extra locks to mediate access to shared resources in a specific order.

Why does your code look the way it does? What forces shaped that general utilities library everyone contributes to? How can platforms succeed by being invisible? Software architecture in 2025 extends far beyond technical diagrams and design patterns. Accordingly, this eMag explores architecture through five distinct lenses: the socio-technical forces that invisibly shape our code, the paradox of infrastructure that succeeds by disappearing, the power of distributed intelligence over centralized control, the evolutionary advantage of iteration over revolution, and the pragmatic reality of designing for inevitable complexity.